Jerry Summers woke up after his childhood friend performed spinal surgery on him and couldn't move his legs or arms. He could only turn his head.

Now, that friend, Christopher Duntsch, is on trial in a Dallas courtroom after several patients were seriously injured during surgery and two died. Duntsch, 45, was charged with five counts of aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury and one count of injury to an elderly person.

"I don't remember feeling any pain," Summers testified in a video played Monday for jurors. "I just couldn't move."

Christopher Duntsch is accused of one count of injury to a child, elderly or disabled person, and five counts of aggravated assault causing serious bodily injury.

((Dallas County Jail))

And Summers still can't move. He demonstrated how he can shrug his shoulders. But he can't move his legs or arms. Doing simple tasks he once took for granted is now impossible. As he spoke, a woman dressed in blue scrubs wiped his nose and mouth with a white tissue.

Summers was questioned by Dallas County prosecutors and Duntsch's defense attorneys in January at his home in Memphis so he would not have to make the trip to Dallas for the trial. He sat in his motorized wheelchair in front of a green wall.

In the video testimony, the voices of the attorneys are heard off screen, asking questions about the surgery after he broke his neck in a car crash and about how he gets around now.

Summers told the attorneys that a harness around his neck is used like a joystick to turn his wheelchair. Other hardware just above his ears allows him to use his head to turn off the wheelchair or make adjustments.

Jerry Summers' video testimony was played in court Monday.

The wheelchair recently malfunctioned and crashed into a telephone pole. Summers broke his left leg. At the end of the deposition, the camera's lens widened beyond how he looks from the chest up. He's held into the wheelchair with a strap, and his broken leg is propped up on a pillow.

Summers and Duntsch were friends in junior high who lost touch after high school. They reconnected when Duntsch was in medical school and remained friends in Memphis. When Duntsch moved to Dallas, Summers followed soon after and became Duntsch's roommate and driver and ran errands for him.

Dr. Joy Gathe-Ghermay, the anesthesiologist who put Summers under for his February 2012 surgery at Baylor Regional Medical Center of Plano, testified that Summers lost a lot more blood than typical — nearly 10 times as much as normal. Gathe-Ghermay said she was prepared to give Summers a blood transfusion but he did not need one.

2011 email

Before Duntsch was ever charged, he sent an email in December 2011 to one of his employees confessing to the desire to kill.

"I am ready to leave the love and kindness and goodness and patience that I mix with everything else that I am and become a cold blooded killer," Duntsch wrote.

Dallas police said in court records that Duntsch "knowingly takes actions that place the patients' lives at risk," police said, such as cutting a major vein and causing a large amount of blood loss without taking proper action to stop it.

Other patients and doctors have testified in recent days about surgeries allegedly botched by Duntsch.

Duntsch, who practiced medicine at hospitals in Dallas and Collin counties, is accused of maiming four patients and causing the death of at least two between July 2012 and June 2013. His trial started last week in a Dallas County courtroom.

Jurors are hearing about several surgeries that went wrong. But Duntsch is on trial only for one charge — injury to an elderly person, Mary Efurd, for injuries she suffered during her surgery. Because of Efurd's age, the charge is a first-degree felony and he faces up to life in prison if convicted.

Efurd testified that she was an active 74-year-old when she had surgery for persistent back pain in 2012. She lost a half-gallon of blood and the use of her legs because of the surgery.

"I trusted him," she testified last week. "I trusted that he would do what was right."

Kellie Martin, 54, a Garland schoolteacher, died in 2012 after back surgery performed by Duntsch. The Collin County medical examiner ruled the cause of death to be "therapeutic misadventure." Duntsch said he believed she had a fatal allergic reaction to an anesthetic.

Patient deaths

Jurors on Monday heard from the husband of Kellie Martin. She was 55 when she died in 2012 after spinal surgery performed by Duntsch. Don Martin, a retired Dallas police lieutenant, told jurors that his wife came out of surgery having difficulties and was taken to ICU.

Her family gasped in the courtroom as nurses described how much pain she was in.

Another patient, Floella Brown, 63, died in July 2012 after she suffered a stroke following a spinal surgery Duntsch performed at Dallas Medical Center.

Texas Medical Board records say Duntsch went overboard during Brown's surgery by removing "bone from an area that was not required by any clinical or anatomical standards, resulting in injury to the vertebral artery."

The board revoked his license in December 2013 and noted that Duntsch violated the standard of care for six patients.

Duntsch told The Dallas Morning News in 2014 that "99 percent of everything that has been said about me is completely false." He claimed to be the victim of misunderstandings, rival surgeons and personal injury lawyers.